New peer-reviewed paper documents massive lobbying by big oil & gas over 20 yrs to promote carbon, capture & storage, spending almost $1 Billion. CCS is a scam.
@akjackson.bsky.social:
I went to a week long workshop many years ago devoted to geophysical methods for verifying that injected and captured CO2 remains captured. I came away with a very pessimistic view of the whole process. The geology and physics are difficult, the economics impossible.Which is why the billion dollar lobbying – to con politicians into believing industry’s lies and in their scam, and to give the scheisters many $billions from the public to pay for it. If companies had to pay for CCS on their own, none of them would do it. They know “stored” CO2 does not stay put and is insignificant as pollution reduction even if it did stay put.
“Despite clear, sustained evidence that CCUS is not a climate solution, is not a good public investment, and is not safe for nearby communities, CCUS has for many years and across many respected quarters been characterized as a necessary technology for the energy transition”
Tracing sources of funds used to lobby the US government about carbon capture, use, and storage by Lindsey E. Gulden and Charles Harvey, Environmental Science & Policy Volume 171, September 2025, 104171
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2025.104171Get rights and content
Analysis of U.S. federal lobbying disclosures from 2005 through 2024 identifies the fossil fuel sector as the primary force behind a multipronged $954-million (2024 USD) lobbying campaign of the U.S. federal government regarding carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) and closely related subjects (e.g., ‘clean’ hydrogen, CO2 pipelines). The campaign of influence has comprised at least 54,243 contacts of high-ranking government officials in the legislative and executive branches and the timing of these lobbying efforts have coincided with significant legislative results. Organizations that directly or indirectly benefit from fossil-fuel sales or combustion were responsible for 89 % of CCUS lobbying spending between 2005 and 2024 Fifteen organizations, led by Occidental Petroleum, Southern Company, and ExxonMobil, are responsible for 50 % of all CCUS lobbying expenditures; all fifteen directly benefit from sale of fossil fuels. In contrast to fossil-fuel companies, the ‘hard-to-abate’ industries that supposedly need CCUS, such as steelmaking, concrete, and paper products, spent only 3 % of all dollars used to lobby the federal government about CCUS. The steel industry spent ten times more lobbying for other environmental topics than they did lobbying about CCUS.
Fossil-fuel interests now benefit from generous, direct, and largely untraceable tradable tax credits as well as billions of appropriated US taxpayer dollars, which slow the energy transition and entrench society’s dependence on fossil fuels.
Internal fossil-fuel company documents released as part of the U.S. House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s multi-year investigation into climate disinformation make clear that the fossil-fuel sector sees carbon capture, use, and storage (CCUS) as a lifeline that will maintain society’s dependence on oil and gas (House Oversight and Accountability Committee HOAC, Democrats, 2024). After a two-decade-long effort to influence the U.S. federal government about CCUS, fossil-fuel interests now benefit from generous, direct, and largely untraceable government subsidies for CCUS (Kim, 2024) as well as billions of appropriated US taxpayer dollars that subsidize facility construction. CCUS was first considered as a climate mitigation strategy as early as the 1990s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2001; Pacala and Socolow, 2004; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2005); however, despite substantial scholarship, government investment, and industrial research and development, CCUS has not panned out as a climate solution (Wang et al., 2021, Robertson, 2022, Bacilieri et al., 2023). On the contrary, CCUS in any form slows the energy transition (Jacobson et al., 2025) and entrenches society’s dependence on the fossil-fuel industry (House Oversight and Accountability Committee HOAC, Democrats, 2024), thereby perpetuating the fossil-fuel-driven climate crisis and associated biodiversity loss, the damage to public health caused by burning fossil fuels, the increase of petrochemical and plastic pollution, and the continuation of fossil-fuel-driven environmental injustice (Wolf et al., 2025).
The impracticality of implementing CCUS is well understood (Ansolabehere et al., 2007, Raymond, 2007, Thomson, 2009, Ehlig-Economides and Economides, 2010). CCUS poses a well known and inherent danger to populations living near large volumes of concentrated carbon dioxide (CO) (Williams, 1958, Zegart, 2021, Hu et al., 2025). The high cost of capturing, storing, and transporting CO is well documented and shows no sign of decreasing (Booras and Smelser, 1991, National Coal Council, 2000, Tsouris et al., 2010, National Petroleum Council, 2019, Zhang et al., 2024). Diverting public dollars to CCUS instead of alternative energy sources presents a huge opportunity cost for mitigating climate change (Tsouris et al., 2010; Jacobson et al., 2025). Furthermore, CCUS has shown itself to be a poor technology for reducing atmospheric carbon concentrations: CCUS projects often emit more carbon than they sequester (Sekera and Lichtenberger, 2020, U.S. Department of Energy, 2023). Despite clear, sustained evidence that CCUS is not a climate solution, is not a good public investment, and is not safe for nearby communities, CCUS has for many years and across many respected quarters been characterized as a necessary technology for the energy transition (e.g., Newell and Anderson, 2003; International Energy Agency (IEA), 2008a; International Energy Agency (IEA), 2008b; IPCC, 2005; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2014; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2018; International Energy Agency (IEA), 2020). This divergence between evidence and the characterization of that evidence poses a conundrum.
Reasons floated in public discourse to support CCUS have changed through time. In the early years of the 21st century, CCUS was presented as a potential way to decarbonize the power grid as coal demand increased to meet growing electricity needs (e.g., Ansolabehere et al., 2007; Schmidt, 2007; IEA, 2008a; IEA, 2008b). CCUS was put forth by the coal sector, power sector, and associates as a component of ‘clean coal technologies’ to be used for mitigating the pollution caused by coal combustion (International Energy Agency (IEA), 2008a, International Energy Agency (IEA), 2008b, National Coal Council, 2009). In the mid 2010s, as renewable energy became cost competitive with fossil-fuel-generated power (e.g., International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), 2015) and the Paris Accords accelerated international pressure to mitigate climate change (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 2016), the messaging used to justify CCUS investment changed. Messaging about CCUS shifted to focus on the technology as the most promising method available for decarbonizing ‘hard-to-abate’ industries such as steel and ironmaking and cement and concrete manufacturing (International Energy Agency (IEA), 2014, Energy Transitions Commission, 2018).
In the past decade, the argument that ‘hard-to-abate’ sectors make CCUS necessary has featured prominently in fossil-fuel-industry press releases (e.g., Carbon Capture Coalition, 2022; Chevron Corporation, 2024; ExxonMobil, 2024), reports written by fossil-fuel-funded think tanks (e.g., Energy Transitions Commission, 2018), and research and policy papers from fossil-fuel-funded academic researchers (e.g., Paltsev et al., 2021; Larson et al., 2021).
Although CCUS has not delivered a climate solution, it continues to succeed in the use case for which it was originally developed: increasing oil production.
The oldest and most widely implemented form of CCUS is a rebranding of a technology for increasing oil production developed by the oil industry in the 1970s, known as ‘enhanced oil recovery’ (EOR) in which CO is injected into old reservoirs or ‘tight’ reservoirs, such as those in the US Permian Basin (Advanced Resources International (ARI), 2006), as a means to flush out more oil (Verma, 2015, National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), 2010). EOR has, since its inception, been useful to oil companies because CO-EOR (i.e., CCUS) makes billions of otherwise untappable oil barrels technically and economically accessible (Advanced Resources International (ARI), 2006, National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), 2010, Occidental Petroleum Corporation, 2025).
Likely because profits from oil sold make EOR the most profitable form of CCUS (Gulden et al., 2025), EOR is by far the most common type of CCUS in operation today (CBO, 2023). EOR increases atmospheric CO because more CO is released by burning the oil produced with EOR than was injected to bring the oil to the surface (e.g., Parker et al., 2011; Cooney et al., 2015; Perera et al., 2016; Olea, 2017; Peck et al., 2018; Sekera and Lichtenberger, 2020; Wang et al., 2024). Although fossil-fuel companies have claimed that CCUS with EOR can be used to produce ‘net-zero oil’ or even ‘net-negative’ (Bakx, 2021, Occidental Petroleum Corporation, 2022), critics have challenged these claims on several grounds. ‘Net-zero’ oil relies on theoretical economic assumptions that lack empirical support (Sekera and Lichtenberger, 2020) and on misleading assumptions about the ultimate source of the CO2 used in EOR (International Energy Agency (IEA), 2019). In practice, EOR operations vent CO2 directly into the atmosphere, particularly when oil prices are low (Robertson and Mousavian, 2022).
The world’s largest ‘CCUS’ project, ExxonMobil’s Shute Creek, is a case in point. ExxonMobil pumps to the surface a mixture of geologic gasses that is composed of 65 % CO, 21 % methane, 7 % nitrogen, 5 % hydrogen sulfide and 0.6 % helium (Parker et al., 2011). As part of its natural-gas processing operation, the company historically released half of the mined CO to the atmosphere: they have vented more CO than is produced from burning the methane. Most of the rest of the mined CO was used for EOR to substantially increase oil production at the nearby oil field in LaBarge, Wyoming (Parker et al., 2011, Robertson and Mousavian, 2022). ExxonMobil touts its climate-damaging operations at Shute Creek and LaBarge as evidence of its “carbon management” bona fides (ExxonMobil, 2022).
The voluminous carbon pollution at Shute Creek and Labarge is now heavily subsidized by the U.S. government with taxpayer dollars earmarked for climate-change mitigation. Billions of U.S. federal dollars have been appropriated to fund both research and infrastructure to enable increased use of EOR. President Biden’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (U.S. Congress, 2022), increased subsidies for CCUS found in the US Internal Revenue Code Section 45Q (United States Code (n.d.)) to $60/ton for CO injected for EOR and to $85/ton for CO injected for geologic storage (i.e., with no EOR). In July 2025, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which increased 45Q tax credits for CO injected for EOR to $85/ton, on par with that for geologic storage (U.S. Congress, 2025). Rather than credit removal of greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, 45Q tax credits are awarded to operators according to the quantity of CO that is injected underground, regardless of how much geologic CO is also vented to the atmosphere, as is the case at Shute Creek. This tax-credit structure incentivizes fossil-fuel companies to tap underground accumulations of ancient CO for use in EOR, in operations where much of that mined fossil CO is released directly to the atmosphere when oil prices fall (Robertson and Mousavian, 2022). Furthermore, because the U.S. Treasury does not release information about amounts and recipients of tax credits, the 45Q subsidy to the fossil-fuel industry is largely untraceable (Kim, 2024).
Perplexed by the U.S. government’s increased use of taxpayer funds, ostensibly earmarked to combat climate change, to directly subsidize a technology that enables both the tapping of long-buried, ancient CO and its use in the extraction of otherwise uneconomical fossil fuels, we set out to understand and quantify the lobbying of the U.S. federal government regarding CCUS and closely related subjects.
Substantial scholarship has documented the effect of lobbying expenditures on policy outcomes (e.g., Baumgartner et al., 2009; de Figueiredo and Richter, 2014; Kang, 2016), including on policy relating to climate change (e.g., Errichiello et al., 2025). Brulle (2018) quantified sectoral U.S. federal government lobbying expenditures related to the broad topic of climate change, and others have quantified lobbying done by specific industries (e.g. Wouters, 2020). Corporate CCUS advocacy has also been the subject of scholarship: researchers at the independent think tank InfluenceMap identified the oil and gas industry as the dominant player in corporate advocacy efforts promoting CCUS, including press releases, financial disclosures, regulatory comments, and corporate media (InfluenceMap, 2023); however, their analysis did not include formal lobbying of U.S. government officials. To our knowledge, what we present here is the first effort to exhaustively quantify lobbying efforts that directly relate to influencing U.S. government policies regarding CCUS.
The Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (U.S. Congress, 1995) mandated the periodic reporting of any efforts to affect federal legislation, regulations, executive orders, or policies as well as any direct communication with high-ranking, ‘covered’ officials. Since 2008, lobbying disclosures have been required on a quarterly basis (U.S. Congress, 2007). A lobbying disclosure report details the organization paying for lobbying efforts, the total dollars spent lobbying during the reporting period, and a listing of individual lobbying efforts (‘activities’) undertaken in the reporting period. For each individual lobbying activity, the report contains a detailed description of the subject of the lobbying effort, the names of lobbyists working on that effort, as well as the departments of the government contacted as part of the effort.
We exhaustively queried federal lobbying disclosures (U.S. Senate, n.d.), using lobbying activity descriptions to identify and tabulate lobbying activities for which we could definitively identify CCUS as a lobbying topic. If a lobbying activity’s description met one or more of the following five conditions, we identified the lobbying efforts described to have covered CCUS: (1) The lobbying activity description directly mentioned CCUS, its many name variations, and/or closely adjacent technologies (Table A.1). (2) The description listed name(s) of legislation that mostly or entirely dealt with CCUS (Table A.2). (3) The activity description contained bill numbers corresponding to CCUS-focused legislation for the Congressional session covered by the disclosure (e.g., “H.R. 1262” in the 118th Congress referred to the CCU Parity Act (U.S. Congress, 2023) Table A.2). (4) The activity description mentioned Federal Register citations of rules or proposed rules dealing with CCUS. (5) The lobbying disclosures were filed by companies whose sole or primary business is CCUS or fossil-based hydrogen (e.g., all activities described by Gulf Coast Sequestration, LLC, were deemed to relate to CCUS). For all terms, we considered common variations (e.g., substituting ‘&’ for ‘and’, ‘CO2’ for ‘carbon dioxide’, ‘H2’ for ‘hydrogen’).
Code used to query and process results is available for inspection; the full post-processed dataset has been made public (Section 6.1).
Many descriptions of lobbying activities did not provide sufficient detail for us to definitively identify CCUS as a topic of discussion. For instance, lobbying activities that mentioned the Energy Sector Innovation Credit Act of the 117th Congress (U.S. Congress. Senate, 2021) were not automatically identified as covering CCUS because, although the legislation did contain a full section devoted to CCUS, it also had several other sections focused on renewable energy; the bill could therefore not be considered definitive indication that CCUS was discussed. We also did not automatically consider technologies such as ‘sustainable aviation fuel’, ‘bioenergy technologies’, or ‘net-zero fuel’ to be CCUS even though many instances of these technologies do rely on CCUS as part of their claim to being ‘low carbon’.
Simply being identified as having lobbied about CCUS can not alone characterize an organization’s sentiment toward the technology. Although in many cases a lobbying-activity description made it clear that the lobbyists were advocating in favor CCUS (e.g., ‘In support of the CCU Parity Act’, ‘effective tax policy to support carbon oxide sequestration’), in not all cases were we able to characterize the lobbying effort as being generally supportive or unsupportive of CCUS. That said, most organizations that we identified as having lobbied about CCUS have made public statements advocating for the technology.
We analyze a set of records submitted over the past two decades, a period during which cumulative currency inflation has significantly changed the value of the U.S. dollar. One dollar in 2005 had approximately the same purchasing power as $1.61 in 2024. We used a freely available software package built on Consumer Price Index data from the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics to adjust dollar values to 2024 USD (Welsh, 2023). All dollar values reported here, unless otherwise specified, are in units of 2024 USD.
Because a single lobbying disclosure document often covers many distinct lobbying activities, not all of which are related to CCUS, we apportioned a disclosure document’s total dollars reported to individual lobbying activities using the fraction of the total count of lobbyists on the filing disclosure that were assigned to a given lobbying activity. Each listing of an individual lobbyist increased the total count of lobbyists by one (i.e., if one named individual appeared on three distinct lobbying activities, that individual increased the disclosure’s total number of lobbyists by three).
We standardized spellings of company names: e.g., ‘Exxon Mobil’ and ‘ExxonMobil’ were grouped as a single company, ‘ExxonMobil’. We lumped all subsidiaries under the same corporate umbrella: e.g., ‘XTO Energy’, a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil Corporation, was lumped as part of ‘ExxonMobil’. Finally, we lumped all formerly independent companies that have merged with others as part of the currently existing company: e.g., lobbying activities of Pioneer Natural Resources, which merged with Exxon Mobil Corporation in 2023, were considered part of the lobbying efforts of a single grouped entity, ExxonMobil. We used organizations’ press releases, organizations’ websites, and a variety of news sources to identify mergers, subsidiaries, and name changes.
Using companies’ own websites and other publicly available descriptions, we assigned each company to a sector (e.g., ‘oil and gas’, ‘air transit’,’think tanks and issue advocacy’, etc.). A full listing of sectors and their corresponding ‘lumped’ general sectors can be found in column 1 of Table A.3.
For the relatively uncommon case of utilities that employ substantial renewable and fossil-fired power generation, we assigned those utilities to the ‘renewable energy’ sector if renewables were deemed to provide a non-negligible and growing component of their electricity generation assets. This approach resulted in a categorization that could be considered to overestimate the number of ‘renewable energy’ companies involved in CCUS lobbying. For example, because NextEra Energy, Inc. has been rapidly increasing its renewable assets and has a stated strategy to continue expanding renewable-energy electricity generation (NextEra Energy, n.d.), we assigned the company to the ‘renewable energy’ sector even though almost half of NextEra’s electricity is generated with natural gas.
After tallying the total dollars spent on activities that could be definitively identified as CCUS, we found that, between January 1, 2005, and December 31, 2024, $954 million were spent to lobby the U.S. federal government about CCUS. More than half was spent since Jan. 1, 2019: in the past 6 years, organizations have spent a combined $518 million dollars lobbying the U.S. government about CCUS.
The timing of CCUS lobbying coincides with significant legislative results. The first major wave of lobbying began in 2008, ahead of the installation of 45Q in the tax code. The second wave began in the two years leading up to the significant increase in CCUS subsidies granted by the IRA and has continued largely unabated (Fig. 1).
The CCUS lobbying effort has comprised tens of thousands of government outreach efforts: since 2005, organizations have made at least 54,243 contacts of federal government agencies to lobby regarding CCUS. In this context, one ‘contact’ means that at least one lobbyist contacted at least one official in a government agency during a 3-month quarter. Multiple contacts of a single official and contacts of multiple officials within a single government entity both show up in this dataset as a ‘single’ contact. More than half of the contacts-30,788 of them-occurred since January 1, 2019. Said differently: on every single workday between the start of 2019 and the end of 2024, at least 20 federal government officials heard about the benefits of CCUS.
The overwhelming majority of CCUS lobbying has been done by fossil-fuel interests. The traditional fossil-fuel sector, including oil and gas exploration and production, petrochemicals, petroleum refining, oilfield services, midstream and pipelines, and coal- and gas-fired power generation, was responsible for 77 % of the total expenditures dedicated to direct lobbying of the federal government about CCUS since 2005. Traditional fossil-fuel companies combined with those industries that indirectly profit from fossil fuels (e.g., the traditional automotive industry, maritime shipping) account for 89 % of the lobbying efforts since 2005. Table A.4 provides total CCUS lobbying expenditures, summed by sector.
In the past two decades, half of the CCUS lobbying has been done by just fifteen organizations, all of which have direct ties to fossil fuels (Fig. 2). The three organizations with the most CCUS-lobbying expenditures are Occidental Petroleum ($94 million spent lobbying about CCUS), Southern Company ($75 million), and ExxonMobil ($50 million). CCUS-focused lobbying makes up a substantial portion of the organizations’ total lobbying expenditures: 34 % of Occidental Petroleum’s lobbying expenses covered lobbying that addressed CCUS, as did 18 % of Southern Company’s, and 10 % of ExxonMobil’s. The fifteen organizations who spent half of the CCUS lobbying dollars lobbied Congress at least 4623 times; they contacted officials in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) (2024) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at least 1047 and 930 times, respectively. In total, those fifteen organizations contacted officials in the Executive Branch at least 7899 times. Table A.5 provides a summary of the CCUS lobbying efforts of the fifty organizations with the largest CCUS lobbying spending. Links to the full post-processed dataset can be found in Section 6.1.
Although recent fossil-fuel-funded public relations campaigns for CCUS heavily feature ‘hard-to-abate’ heavy industry as driving the need for CCUS, these hard-to-abate industries themselves make up a small fraction of all CCUS lobbying of the U.S. government: the $6.1 million in total CCUS lobbying spending by ‘hard-to-abate’ industries (including steel/iron, paper products, cement, and ethanol) made up only 3 % of all dollars used to lobby the U.S. federal government about CCUS. That 24-to-1 imbalance in CCUS lobbying spending between fossil-fuel-linked sectors and non-fossil-fuel industry is not because those ‘hard to abate’ sectors lobby less: for example, from 2005 through 2024, the steel industry spent at least $70.6 million lobbying the federal government on environmental topics not related to CCUS. Restated, the steel industry spent more than 11 times as much lobbying for environmental topics not including CCUS as they did lobbying about CCUS. That is, the industries that fossil-fuel interests highlight as driving the need for CCUS are not the industries that are driving the lobbying of U.S. government officials about CCUS.
Indirect fossil fuel influence extends into the CCUS lobbying done by organizations that are not overtly connected to fossil fuels, which creates an illusion of cross-sector consensus around the importance of CCUS. However, a close review of CCUS lobbying by sectors that are not traditionally linked to fossil fuels reveals that most of the ‘other sector’ organizations with the largest CCUS lobbying expenditures maintain ties to the fossil-fuel industry.
Our analysis showed that the US Chamber of Commerce, a business advocacy group generously supported by oil majors such as ExxonMobil (ExxonMobil, 2024), spent $17 million lobbying the U.S. government about CCUS from 2005 through 2024. The other ‘business advocacy’ organizations identified as having lobbied about CCUS are the National Association of Manufacturers ($4.1 million spent); which has documented strong ties to the fossil-fuel industry (Savage, 2019). An additional $519 thousand of CCUS lobbying expenditures were made by the Business Roundtable, a powerful trade group with a history of support for investment in CCUS (Business Roundtable, 2021) and that filed an amicus brief in support of gutting stringent SEC climate disclosure rules (InfluenceMap, 2024; Business Roundtable, 2024). The two other business advocacy groups lobbying about CCUS were the Chamber of Commerce of Greater Pittsburgh, a city with heavy ties to the fossil-fuel industry (Milman, 2023), and the Western Business Roundtable, a now-defunct organization that was linked to energy-industry lobbyists working to undermine government climate initiatives (Grandia, 2009).
The largest lobbying expenditures made in other non-fossil-fuel sectors were made by sector members with substantial ties to the fossil-fuel industry and who, for the most part, have publicly stated their support for CCUS. For example, over the past two decades, the Nature Conservancy (funded in part by Shell (The Nature Conservancy, 2024)) spent $1.3 million on CCUS lobbying; the Clean Air Task Force (with multiple board members who have ties to fossil-fuel organizations (Clean Air Task Force (CATF), 2024) spent $2.2 million; and the Bipartisan Policy Center, funded generously by ExxonMobil (ExxonMobil, 2024), spent $804 thousand.
Academia has also been identified as a target for fossil fuel influence of research and policy (Hiltner et al., 2024). Our results show that at least nineteen universities, many if not all of which receive substantial fossil-fuel funding (Data for Progress, 2023), have invested $1.8 million lobbying for CCUS since 2005 and have made more than 595 contacts of government offices. These lobbying efforts peaked in 2021 before the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which substantially increased the 45Q tax credit for CO2 injection (Fig. 3).
The massive U.S. government investment in CCUS has delivered few if any benefits to U.S. taxpayers. Taxpayer dollars supporting CCUS projects have either been wasted, support carbon-emitting EOR projects, or both. One failed project, the Kemper Plant in Mississippi, operated by Southern Company, harvested several hundred million dollars in subsidies over eleven years of construction before it was demolished in 2021 without sequestering any carbon (Wilson, 2019). Of the eight coal-fired power plants that received $684 million from the DOE prior to 2022, only one – the Petra Nova project in Texas – was successfully completed, and, because it uses CO for EOR, has operated intermittently and is a net carbon polluter (Robertson, 2022). Thirteen of the 15 operating CCUS projects that presumably receive 45Q subsidies use CO for increasing oil recovery (Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 2023), thereby increasing carbon pollution. Of the two DOE-funded projects that do not use injected CO for EOR, the largest, the Illinois Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage project operated by Archer-Daniels-Midland Project, was shut down in late 2024 after CO leaked along a wellbore, threatening the overlying drinking-water aquifer (Anchondo, 2024).
Despite failing to deliver benefits to taxpayers, U.S. government investment in CCUS has delivered handsomely for the fossil-fuel industry. Federal subsidies supporting fossil-fuel companies’ CCUS projects already greatly exceed the $954 million spent lobbying. In fiscal years 2022, 2023, and 2024, the DOE spent nearly ten billion dollars ($9,926,000,000) on CCS (Congressional Research Service (CRS), 2021a, Congressional Research Service (CRS), 2021b), a sum that does not include dollars paid as part of the 45Q tax credit, which is administered by the U.S. Department of Treasury. In 2024 alone, Occidental Petroleum, which spent the most lobbying, received carbon capture grants exceeding more than a half a billion dollars from the DOE (Dareen, 2024;1PointFive, 2024). Southern Company, with the second largest lobbying effort, received hundreds of millions of federal dollars for the failed Kemper project (Wilson, 2019). Section 45Q payments are set to balloon in the coming decade: the Department of Treasury estimated that, between 2022 and 2032, 45Q tax credits will cost the federal government $30.2 billion (Congressional Research Service (CRS), 2021a, Congressional Research Service (CRS), 2021b). Despite the failure of these subsidized projects to reduce emissions, three new CCS power projects have recently been selected for DOE subsidies totaling an additional $890 million of federal money (DOE, 2024).
The fossil-fuel sector’s efforts to shape government climate policy, including CCUS subsidies, is not unique to the United States. Despite strong Australian public support for effective climate action and a history of failure CCUS projects (Marshall, 2022) that mirrors the experience of the United States, the Australian government, heavily funded by fossil-fuel interests (Moss, 2022), continues to promote CCUS as a key emissions-reduction technology and to heavily invest investing public money in subsidizing CCUS projects (Global CCS Institute, 2022) as part of a larger co-opting of Australian government policy by the fossil-fuel industry (Hemming et al., 2022). Fossil-fuel industry lobbying has coincided with increased government support for CCUS in the UK (Jordan, 2024) and in Canada (InfluenceMap, 2023).
One valuable return on the fossil-fuel sector’s CCUS-lobbying investment has been the U.S. government’s codification of CCUS as a climate ‘solution’ worthy of public investment. This ‘state-sponsored greenwash’ (Hemming et al., 2022), in which fossil-fuel interests have co-opted U.S. government policy to both legitimize and support CCUS further solidifies the successes of a multilevel, multifaceted greenwashing campaign by fossil-fuel interests to promote CCUS as a climate solution (Monbiot, 2008; Beder, 2014; Valiante, 2024). Our work adds evidence to support this assertion.
Nemes et al. (2022) define greenwashing as “the dissemination of false or deceptive information regarding an organization’s environmental strategies, goals, motivations, and actions”. Others expand this definition to include deception about the environmental benefits of a specific product or service (e.g. TerraChoice/Underwriters Laboratory, 2009). Promotion of CCUS as a climate solution by fossil-fuel companies, who view CCUS as a way to preserve their fossil-fuel-based business model (House Oversight and Accountability Committee HOAC, Democrats, 2024), is inherently deceptive, especially given the broad consensus that a fossil-fuel phase out is needed to address the climate crisis (International Energy Agency (IEA), 2021, Oreskes, 2023, Reuters, 2024, United Nations, 2015, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 2023). At a basic level, rebranding enhanced oil recovery as ‘carbon capture, utilization, and storage’ is a tactic of greenwashing (TerraChoice/Underwriters Laboratory, 2009).
The argument that CCUS is the only climate solution for ‘hard to abate’ industries is also a deceptive marketing tactic that meets definitions of greenwashing. Although CCUS is considered as one of several possible decarbonization technologies for industries such as steel and cement, CCUS is by no means the only or the most promising option for decarbonizing these heavy industries (e.g., Habert et al., 2020). Our work provides substantial evidence that the narrative of hard-to-abate industries wanting and needing CCUS is part of a greenwashing campaign centered on establishing CCUS for the benefit of the fossil-fuel industry. As noted in our results, the ‘hard to abate’ industries themselves are not clamoring for government assistance to enable CCUS. Rather, the fossil-fuel industry is both the chief industry asking for CCUS subsidies and is, by far, the chief beneficiary of CCUS subsidies as currently structured in the US.
Our findings are consistent with the fossil-fuel industry’s shift away from its well-documented propaganda campaign to discredit the science of climate change (e.g., Oreskes and Conway, 2010; Supran and Oreskes, 2020; House Oversight and Accountability Committee HOAC, Democrats, 2024) toward a new strategy that includes using facades of cross-sector consensus about false climate solutions to greenwash the industry’s ongoing role in worsening climate change and to delay meaningful climate action (Supran and Oreskes, 2021, Li et al., 2022, Martinez and Kilbury, 2023, House Oversight and Accountability Committee (HOAC), Democrats, 2024). Others have noted that some environmental nonprofits engage in an apparent quid pro quo, trading their reputation of environmental legitimacy in exchange for fossil-fuel support (Ottaway and Stephens, 2003, Stephens, 2010, Elgin, 2020 Dec 9). We here provide evidence consistent with the assertion that fossil-fuel interests are leveraging partnerships with environmental nonprofits, other advocacy groups, and universities to increase the spectrum of voices seen to be lobbying the federal government about CCUS. These efforts are not without reputational casualty: universities’ CCUS advocacy conflicts with the generally accepted role of institutions of higher education. University administrators and faculty who visit Congress need not register as lobbyists when following their conventional role of simply educating legislators; they must only register as lobbyists when their goal is to change a bill, law, or regulation. Universities’ missions are widely understood to include engineering and scientific analysis that is objective; yet advocating for specific CCUS regulation directly benefits the fossil-fuel companies that fund their programs.
It is rarely possible to prove that specific legislation passed because of a particular lobbying effort, and CCUS subsidies are no different. But the publicly available data we analyze here makes it clear that fossil-fuel companies, and their adjacent organizations, are the primary lobbyists for CCUS subsidies and that these subsidies benefit fossil-fuel companies at the expense of both taxpayers and the future health of our planet.
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Charles Harvey: Visualization, Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing, Formal analysis. Lindsey Gulden: Writing – original draft, Validation, Software, Methodology, Formal analysis, Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration, Investigation, Data curation.
The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Charles Harvey reports a relationship with Commonwealth of Massachusetts attorney general that includes: paid expert testimony. Lindsey Gulden (corresponding author) previously worked for Exxon Mobil Corporation and is suing the company for wrongful termination under Sarbanes Oxley.
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